On the EXPERIENCE or on the INFRASTRUCTURE?

Do we figure out ways to make the experience thinner, sacrificing features and experiences to limit bandwidth consumption? Imagine what the web would be like today if that had been the case with the evolution of Internet traffic. Google would be doing a lot better with Chromebooks, and end users would be hopelessly tethered to thin, client/server computing where all their apps and data resided somewhere other than their own personal machines. It seems like consumers and professionals are still largely ambivalent to the idea of broadly adopting client/server models of computing. We've been talking about the Cloud revolution and SaaS for several years now - and most business data still gets created in a local copy of Office and most IT Datacenters and their engineers are still buying bare metal severs and building their machines, either physical or VM, on that - not collocated in some JIT hosted site where they spin up a new server, or add or remove metered CPUs or memory depending on your needs and demands. Thin computing translates to a loss of control, both of physical aspects and of costs, and I think people intuitively know this.

If we had taken this approach with traditional wired infrastructure, we might all be happy paying $150 a month for a 56k ISDN line and a 1mb connection would still be several thousand dollars a month. Instead, we've driven the technology to the point where 4G *wireless* connections can deliver 30mb up/down. Do you know how fast you can hit a 4gb cap at 30mb up/down? Why have the speed? It is having a Ferrari you can only drive to the end of your driveway before it runs out of gas.

The difference is that traditional models of providing bandwidth competed with one another to deliver the best speeds on unlimited pipes for the best price - and this spurred TREMENDOUS competition in this industry.

I believe the Wireless providers are in collusion to prevent this kind of infrastructure competition and innovation. They like their business model just the way it is, conservative and non-competitive.